Well, the music department managed to complete our four-week experiment. In this week’s print edition, Feedback File touches on the, um, “study” City Paper conducted from mid-February through this week, taking aim at the suspicious listings in the Post and Courier’s weekly Preview section. We suspected Preview’s listings writers of simply borrowing a big bulk of City Paper’s listings and placing them in their “In the Club” listings — a simple cut-and-paste job, with no verification or research on their part. And we caught them in the act.We planted more than a few bogus band names (some were totally silly and made-up, some were based n real acts or actual band names) in our online Music Board listings to see if Preview would fall for the gag and list them in their own pages. We deleted the fake names after a short time online, and never published any of them in print. They fell for it again and again, publishing them in their pages between Thurs. Feb. 14 and Thurs. March 6.For good measure (and a parting shot), we added a two dozen more phony band names to this week’s City Paper‘s Music Board online listings (the Wed. March 12 issue). They were deleted today (Wed. March 12), hopefully just before Preview went to the printer. Did Preview bite again? If it strikes your fancy, look through their pages for any of these bogus band names and gigs:
Mojo Psyche Out
The Smokes
Hung Up on a Dream
Three Kingfishers
Donovan in a Crowd
Unwanted Freedom
The London-Led Outpouring
Johnny Moped
The Adverts
Technicolour Dream
The Bored Teenagers
TV Smith
Scottish Media
The Post-Modern Lovers
Ice Cream for Crow
The Only Minority
Fake Contest
Split Red
Sell or Be Sold
Beacon Sighted Through Fog
The Radiators From Space
Stiff Boomtown
Spring Session M
The main message to Preview? Either do your own homework and properly verify your live music listings, or totally remove the entire “In the Clubs” section from your pages … or, feel free to run the City Paper logo and a disclaimer explaining that a major portion of your listings come “thanks to the Charleston City Paper.”It’s fun putting lists of phony band names together. It’s even more fun watching them end up in print. Maybe we’ll keep it up this season just for kicks — but that’s for us to know and Preview to find out!
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